Many savings bank customers are facing an innovation when it comes to cashless payments. Instead of using their own Payback card, they should be able to collect points when shopping with their debit card in the future.
The savings banks want to work with the Payback bonus system on their payment cards. In the future, it will be possible for savings bank customers to collect Payback points using a debit card.
“We believe that the cooperation of these two big players in the market can create significant advantages for our customers – that’s why we’re doing it now,” said a spokesman for the German Savings Banks and Giro Association (DSGV) today. Accordingly, the collaboration could be contractually sealed in the coming days. The industry service “Finanz-Scene” had previously reported.
Points are credited automatically
Payback users can collect points when shopping in supermarkets or drugstores, for example, in order to later redeem them for vouchers or rewards. Until now you had to have a Payback card. That should change in the future – at least for savings bank customers.
Anyone who is a customer of a savings bank should have their points credited automatically when they pay with their debit card. How this will work with cash payments is still unclear.
With the planned cooperation, two large providers in the market for payment services are joining forces. With 47 million cards issued, the savings banks are the largest issuer of the Girocard, which many still call the “EC card”. According to its own information, Payback has around 31 million users in Germany. The company is a subsidiary of the credit card provider American Express.
Data protection concerns
It is therefore “obvious to intensively examine the overlaps here in order to ultimately simplify certain processes for our customers,” said a spokeswoman for Deutsche Sparkassen Verlag (DSV), which led the negotiations with Payback as a service provider for the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe has.
However, Payback’s business model is controversial among consumer advocates because the company collects and uses data on a large scale. The DSV spokeswoman emphasized that data protection and voluntariness are central – both for customers and for the institutes.
Each of the 353 savings banks in Germany should decide for themselves whether to use the offer or not. According to reports, between 250 and 300 savings banks have signaled that they want to offer their customers the payback function.